portaudio won't load

[soren_jepsen]

I've been trying to get Bitwig up and running with my XITE. However, I only get to the splash screen, and then it just sits there. When I close Scope, bitwig starts up fine. I can run it no problem with a Motu Ultralite in asio. However, when I choose the XITE asio in bitwig and restart it, I'm back to sq one :-/

Thinking back, I realize I have the same problem with Sibelius. Eventually I gave up on running vst's (piano mostly) inside Sibelius, and just sent midi out. I had some kind help from the folks over at Sibelius. They even sent me a different portaudio file. Nothing helped thou.

Both Bitwig and Sibelius uses portaudio when you choose asio drivers. However, it seems portaudio doesn't want to talk to the XITE asio drivers.

Have anyone succesfully run XITE asio's in Bitwig? If so what is your setup? And do anyone have any idea of what the problem actually is?

My system is a asus P6T motherboard with a Core i7 920 cpu, running a 64bit win7

Cheers
Søren

[mausmuso]

Sounds like a similar issue I have with Translator 6, I have never been able to get that working with XITE on a 64bit machine.
My suggestions would be:
- Make sure you have a wave source module loaded in case it is looking for something other than ASIO;
- Try 44.1K and 48k, sometime apps will work on 44.1 only to begin with;
- Check what your default windows sound source is set at and make it a SCOPE source;
- Try running the app in a compatibility mode (eg XP SP3).
Good luck.
Regards
maus

[soren_jepsen]

Yea, I tried all of the above, to no avail.

Anyone else got an idea?

Cheers

[fra77x]

I'm not sure about portaudio, but i 'm currently using rtaudio and it works fine with scope asio and wave drivers in 96kHz. (xite-1/win 7 32 bit)
I have some plans to test portaudio too, when i do i'll post my results.

[ehasting]

Hello,

Running win7 32 bit with scope 5.1 i am trying to test bitwig, but never get across splash screen. Any tips on moving onward?


Rgs
Egil

[ronnie]

I have zero experience with portaudio so I don't know if this would work but at this point you have nothing to lose. I remember having similar issues but I don't remember with which program. Have you tried exiting SCOPE and restarting it just before running Bitwig? Are you running any other audio products that are using SCOPE ASIO before you load Bitwig? If so don't run anything before Bitwig.

Have you tried using ASIO4ALL?

If you can't get into Bitwig at all, maybe you should NOT load SCOPE and run Bitwig at least to maybe get in with maybe some kind of error message like "no audio driver found, proceed?". If so or if not, close Bitwig and load SCOPE and install ASIO4ALL and run it's control panel to make sure all the SCOPE drivers are showing in ASIO4ALL. Then try it and see if Bitwig loads up with the ASIO4ALL driver and choose the ASIO4ALL driver. You may have to run the ASIO4ALL again to get all the SCOPE ports to connect. Sometimes after the program will accept ASIO4ALL and load you can select the native SCOPE ASIO drivers and they will now work. If that happens you can see if they load after you close and then reopen Bitwig. ASIO4ALL should use the SCOPE sample rate and latency settings you set in SCOPE automatically.

On another note, I saw this from Googling, maybe Bitwig thinks that the SCOPE ASIO is not available and is being used by another program, even though it's not. This was a problem with older ASIO4ALL versions in conjunction with portaudio. You might try to set the SCOPE driver to "allow applications to take exclusive control" in the Windows playback and recording devices (right click on the speaker icon in the task bar) and choose "playback devices" and select one of the SCOPE outputs, click the advanced tab and click on the exclusive mode boxes, do the same with "recording devices", close and try to load Bitwig. I know these are kludge fixes and running SCOPE drivers directly is preferred but if this works you can at least use SCOPE.

[ehasting]

Hey,

Thanks for your suggestions! i will try out and report back.

I am using FL Studio today, but have been intressted in bitwig because of the linux capability (which is what i run at my laptop).
However i need to be able to integrate it with my scope and hardware in my "bedroom" studio.

However i do love FL studio for its workflow, however its capability to integrate with external hardware/scope is among the worst in class


Rgs
Egil Hasting

[ehasting]

Cant seem to get by the splash screen at all - not sure if there is any successfull users out there of bitwig.
I have filed a request to their helpdesk - however old answers on the internet indicats they will blame sonic core. However this might have changed over time .


Rgs
Egil

[ronnie]

I hear ya brutha. I had a problem running Aria Player Standalone mode in SCOPE ASIO. Aria support says basically that's what you get for running SCOPE ASIO! Not a big deal because I can run the VST inside Cantabile for "standalone" live stuff. I've tried searching some more, I guess just to drive myself nuts - it's like the Helsinki Syndrome - but no joy with Bitwig.

[Mr Arkadin]

Aria support says basically that's what you get for running SCOPE ASIO!

Or "We can't be arsed to look into the issue."

I never heard of this PortAudio before today, but a quick rummage on the internet seems to suggest it isn't a great base on which to build. The two systems that use it (Sibelius and Bitwig) didn't play nice with Scope, so I think the common denominator seems to be the issue. But of course they won't admit that or fix it.

[garyb]

many of the latest audio apps may have this problem, especially if they are inexpensive or "consumer" apps.

the reason is that the writers of the apps are lazy. they expect everyone to use a Windows soundcard, which is controlled by the app itself. a Scope card is NOT a Windows soundcard. as far as Windows is concerned it is external audio hardware(Scope is controlled by it's own program). the app(Portaudio) sends configuration data to the card and then the card doesn't answer(because it can't) and the app hangs. they shouldn't write the app like that, but it's easier for kids who know nothing about computers to use the app, since the soundcard is automatically configured.

[ronnie]

I just saw this on StackOverflow:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9680 ... and-wdm-ks

"PortAudio shows a device count of zero for both Asio and WDM-KS

I found the solution. Luckily, I had a friend who had a project working using ASIO. He let me try running his code on my box and it was able to find the ASIO devices correctly. From there it was a matter of working backwards until I found the thing that was different between the 2 projects.

Both projects used a c# application to host a managed c++ assembly that made the calls into PortAudio. The issue ended up being that my projects static void Main(string[] args) didn't have an [STAThread] attribute. Once I added that, the ASIO devices started showing up. Hope this helps someone."

Looks to me like the guy had to redo his own custom DAW(?) code to properly call into the PortAudio API which he showed is easily broken by not having one attribute (which should be part of the code documentation anyway). I would guess that Bitwig and Sibelius are guilty of same. Every good geek looks at StackOverflow. Gary's point is well taken.

[hubird]

great find

[ehasting]

From bitwig support:

do you have another soundcard to test/work with?
We're pushing things to get rid of these kinds of problems by using another backend, but as of such, we can't fix our PortAudio system anymore, sorry. The new system should be in place soon.

[ronnie]

Somehow I don't think we should hold our breath.

[ehasting]

[ehasting]

we're implementing the new Backend for version 1.2. In the meantime, you could actually try to test the card under Linux, but this will not help you much if you rely on too many VSTs.
If you don't want to install Linux on your machine, this should also be possible using a Linux live system.

[ronnie]

The PortAudio architecture and congestion control are not very often incompatible as we have tested so far on our own desktop machines. Although it is impossible to test every conceivable scenario our heuristic caches actually buffer much better than most other solutions. We have seen some isolated cases where latency increased by 6269 dB and CPU performance was degraded by 7261 bytes and thus far our development team have been able to fix only part of this question on Linux. Therefore in the meantime we are moving forward on a completely new revamp with a native 64bit architecture to achieve more efficient modalities.

[jksuperstar]

Nice day late April Fool's there, ronnie I think sometimes I might wish for a 6269db latency

we're....

Do tell?! I had no idea you were involved with bitwig?

[ronnie]

I'm the new "backend" with port audio if you get my drift or draft as it were. Sample that!